


Somewhere in the House, Late Spring

by Mireille



Series: You Are the Everything [2]
Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-12 01:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20163511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Maria's home is more familiar to Carol than it really should be.





	Somewhere in the House, Late Spring

****

The house is more familiar to Carol than it really should be, since she's only been here once before now. She hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the furnishings then, either. Staying alive, keeping Maria and Monica safe, helping Talos--those all had been much more important at the time.

There are still some gaps in her memory, but when Carol needed a rest, she knew where to go. She came home: to her family, to her best friend, to the kid who calls her Auntie Carol and seems to have grown at least two inches in the three months Carol's been away.

On this visit, though, she has the chance to notice just how many memories this house sparks. The dining-room table is new, but the one in the kitchen is from Maria's old apartment, the one where baby Monica used to spit her peas at them. The one where Carol spent an afternoon with a four-year-old Monica, helping her paste construction paper onto a paper doily to make a Valentine for Maria. This morning at breakfast, she noticed that there's even still a bit of glitter embedded in a crack in the wood. 

The couch carries memories of Saturday-morning cartoons with Monica, of rented videos and buttered popcorn on Friday nights. They aren't things she's been conscious of knowing, even after she remembered who she is, but here in Maria's house, the images that have been dormant inside her for years keep coming back. 

This is the place where she feels most like herself--like _Carol Danvers_, not Vers and not "Captain Marvel."

She has her own room here. Monica told her that there's always been a room for her in this house, though Maria shrugs it off, saying that someone had to deal with all the stuff Carol left behind. It just made sense, she says, to use the things from Carol's old apartment to furnish the spare room. 

Carol would have thought that her room would be the place that feels the most familiar to her, but it doesn't. She's sitting here, on a bed that she bought, with a bedspread she picked out, and none of it feels like it belongs to her home. 

If she thinks about it, she can remember buying the bedspread, putting the bed frame together, struggling to get the mattress into place, but none of it feels like it's really hers. Maria and Monica hung up the pictures Maria kept for her, put out some of the things they'd been storing all the time she was gone--all the time Maria thought she was dead--and _those_ things feel right, but not the furniture. 

Suddenly, that bothers her: why is someone else's home more familiar to her than her own? Granted, she knows that apartment was only temporary, like everything is when you're in the military and can be transferred at any time, but Maria's place was, too, and it's burned into her bones somehow.

Why is this a thing that won't come back to her? She gets flashes sometimes--standing at the kitchen counter to gulp down a bowl of cereal, yelling at a football game on TV, dancing around the living room to a cheesy pop song--but any time she tries to think about life before the crash, about her _home_, she always comes back to Maria's apartment. 

She's getting frustrated, and her memory isn't going to completely restore itself just because she's scowling at it, so she goes down the stairs and out the front door to sit on the steps. The humid night air isn't familiar either, but there's no reason it should be, so that's fine. 

She's been out here maybe twenty minutes when the door opens, then closes. Carol knows Maria's footsteps--besides, Monica would have let the door slam behind her--so she's not surprised when Maria hands her a glass of iced tea, and then sits down on the steps next to her. 

"I'm out here because I'm tired of telling that child that she'd be done with her homework by now if she'd stop griping about it and start doing it," Maria says. "How about you? Just felt like feeding the mosquitoes?" She slaps at one on her own arm, like punctuation. 

Mosquitoes don't bite Carol any more; they dislike the Kree blood, the energy surging through her cells, or both. "Just trying to get my head together."

Maria drinks her tea in silence for a little while. "Anything I can help with?" she says after a minute. 

"No," Carol says immediately, because she's been trying not to rely on anyone but herself. She'd leaned on Yon-Rogg for help when she was troubled, before, and that had turned out _so_ damn well. 

It's hard to shed the habits she's built up, but she remembers being able to trust Maria before. She could try that again. "Maybe," she amends her answer. She hadn't even realized that there'd been tension between them until it eases. 

"So tell me, what's wrong in your head today?"

"I don't know," Carol admits. "Maybe nothing. Something just feels weird, and I don't know what to think about it."

"What's weird to the woman who can fly?"

"Hey, I can do more than fly. I can also toast marshmallows without lighting a fire," she protests. It's a frivolous application of the photon blasts, but it impresses Monica, and at her age, Monica's a lot harder to impress than she used to be. 

Besides, the Kree would have disapproved of her using her powers so lightly, and every toasted marshmallow is a tiny fuck-you to them all. 

"That makes you less weird?"

They both laugh. "I guess not," Carol says. "And it really might be nothing. It's just that I was in my room earlier. The stuff in there came from my old apartment, right?"

"The dresser's new," Maria says. "Not new-new, it came from a yard sale, but it's not from your place. The one you had was in such bad shape it wouldn't have survived the move. But yeah, most of the stuff in there is yours, so if you hate it, you know who to blame."

Carol takes a sip of her tea; Maria always makes it too sweet. She remembers struggling not to spit it out the first time she drank it, and Maria laughing at her.

"Don't come down to Louisiana," Maria had said, "you won't be able to escape the sweet tea."

She's here now, and it's true, the tea is inescapable. But these days, she's not worried about fitting into her jeans; she's not wearing them as tight as she did then, and anyway, her powered-up metabolism burns through all the calories she can shove at it. Truth be told, she's getting used to the taste of the tea, too. 

It's part of being home, and she wonders if Maria would laugh if she took some tea into space with her next time. Sugar is a basic enough carbohydrate that she'll have no trouble finding it, but while there are plenty of things called "tea" out there in the galaxy, none taste quite like the bags of Tetley Maria buys. 

There's no "if" about it, given the faces she used to make about Maria's iced tea. The question is _how hard_ Maria will laugh. 

"I don't hate the stuff in my room," Carol says, because they can talk about tea later. "I just don't remember it very well. I remember some things, like choosing the bedspread, but I don't remember living there."

Maria puts her hand on Carol's arm. "Honey, you didn't live here, remember? I moved back home after the crash, when I left the Air Force. You'd never been here before you showed up with Fury."

Carol doesn't shrug her hand off the way Vers would have. It feels good to be touched in some way other than with a fist. Monica's a hugger, so at least Carol will be able to pay down her touch deficit whenever she visits, but this is good, too. Better than good. 

"I know that," she says. "But I remember things about your place. I have so many memories about that couch of yours. I look at the kitchen table, and I can hear Monica banging her sippy cup on it. But I look at my bedroom, and there's nothing. Some of the pictures and things, yeah, I remember those. But not my furniture. It feels less mine than the rest of the house does, and it's getting to me."

Maria sighs, but doesn't say anything else. Carol had expected a little more of a reaction, maybe some reassurance that all of her memories would come back to her in time, but instead, she gets a sigh and some silence. What the hell?

Finally, though, Maria says, "I guess it's time," in a soft voice. She gets back up to her feet, leaving her glass sitting on the top step, and reaches for Carol's hand. "Come on. I want to show you something."

Carol takes Maria's hand and stands up. "Something that's going to make this make more sense?"

"Yeah, I think so." She leads the way back into the house. "Homework, Monica," she calls as they pass the doorway into the living room. "You'd better have turned that TV on by accident."

The sound of a sitcom laugh track cuts off abruptly. "I'm studying, Mom!" Monica yells. "I must've put my book down on the remote!"

"A likely story," Maria calls back, and motions for Carol to follow her upstairs. 

She opens the door to her bedroom. Carol hasn't been in here before; she's been trying to respect Maria's personal space. She doesn't get to just drop back in every few months and invade every single corner of Maria's life. 

Maria's doing Carol a favor by letting her live here when she's on Earth. It's not a surprising favor, because Maria's her best friend, her family, but Carol doesn't want to take it for granted.

Maria sits down on the edge of her bed and pats the quilt next to her. "Sit with me?"

Carol sits. She looks down at the quilt, one that she remembers being told has been on Maria's bed since she was a kid, and suddenly, before Maria can say anything else...

She remembers. 

She remembers this quilt, she remembers seeing it on Maria's bed years ago, she remembers--

She remembers Maria, lying back on the quilt, sweat beading on her skin as she stretches out bare and beautiful beneath Carol.

She remembers the way her own hands twisted in the quilt, another day, as Maria's tongue worked between her legs, driving her further and further toward the edge until Carol screamed. (And then woke the baby, which Maria grumped about for at least the next two days.) 

She remembers huddling under the quilt together, swallowing all of Maria's gasps and whimpers with her kisses as she slid a finger inside Maria. 

She remembers _everything_.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she demands, and she can hear the way that her tears are making her voice thick. She's never liked crying, not since she was a kid, but she _forgot this_, and she can't keep the tears back.

Of all the things she forgot, this is the one that hurts.

If she ever sees Yon-Rogg again, she's going to kick his ass so hard for taking this from her. 

Maria shakes her head. "I didn't want to push you into anything. I was just so happy we had you back, and if all you remembered was being my friend, that was okay. That was all I needed. But you don't have a lot of memories of sleeping in your apartment because you almost never did sleep there." She smiles. "I had Monica, so I couldn't come to your place, so--"

"So I always came to yours," Carol finishes. It's all so clear in her mind now that it's hard to believe she ever forgot. "Whenever I could, anyway. It helped that you had Monica. If anyone asked why I was there so much, we could say you needed help with the baby." 

Some of the guys had called her a dyke anyway, but they did that to all the women officers, at least the ones who didn't want to sleep with them. It was a boys' club, and the male pilots had made sure that she and Maria knew it. But there'd never been any real suspicion, no questions about the nature of their relationship.

"You remember that?" Maria asks, her voice so filled with hope that it makes Carol's chest ache.

"Yeah, I remember that," she echoes. "I also remember it's been more than six years since I kissed my girlfriend."

"So maybe you should get right on that, huh, hotshot?"

Carol hasn't kissed anyone since before the crash. She's been too focused on helping the Skrulls, and before that, too desperate to learn to control her powers and to prove herself. Yon-Rogg would have taken her to bed, she knows, but she hadn't wanted him. 

Now she knows why: the part of her that screamed the truth in her dreams wouldn't let her turn her back on Maria. 

But now she's here, and Maria's here, and she _remembers_.

She can have this. All she has to do is lean over and kiss the woman she loves, the woman who so obviously wants her to do that just that. 

It's terrifying. What if they find out that after all this time, they don't feel the same anymore? She could lose Maria all over again. 

But Carol believes in facing her fears, and so she leans forward and finally, completely, comes home.

****

**Author's Note:**

> [me on dreamwidth](https://mireille719.dreamwidth.org/)


End file.
